Blue Dragon

Platform: Xbox 360.
Verdict: Deep but dated adventure.
Rating: 3½/5
Cracking the Japanese games market has so far been difficult for Microsoft’s console division - with the 360 faring little better in the land of the rising sun than the original and far uglier Xbox, all hope is pinned on the Japanese love of RPGs and releases such as Blue Dragon, Lost Odyssey and Eternal Sonata.
Blue Dragon tells the epic, 3 disc long tale of Shu, Kluke and Jiro, on a mission to save the world from evil. Advised to swallow glowing blue orbs (just say no kids!), the hapless trio find their shadows transformed into mighty creatures that fight on their behalf.
Full of turn based battles, levelling-up and light hearted adventuring, Blue Dragon is as traditional as it gets and with a team made up of Japan’s RPG glitterati it’s hardly surprising. Notable Final Fantasy stalwarts Hironobu Sakaguchi and Nobuo Uematsu accompany Akira Toriyama (of Dragon Ball Z fame) for an RPG dream team line up, bringing iconic design, music and character art with them.
Beside the traditional gameplay, Blue Dragon attempts to be unique through its distinct CG style graphics and subtle variations on genre mechanics. Shadows are key to these variations and are the gameplay and visual hook to differentiate it from its peers.
Assigned classes such as Black Mage or Assassin, they can swap and change to different ones, learn class specific abilities then change back, cannily retaining the newly gained powers and allowing you to design a team of your own choosing.
Random battles are also thankfully missing, allowing you to pick and choose what you fight but beyond that little is new.
On paper Blue Dragon ticks the right boxes and with such a stellar line up it’s easy to see why so much was expected of it but at its heart lies a game so traditional it’s beyond cliche and, as solid as it is, has been far superseded by its peers - in both Japan and the West.

King of Fighters XI

Platform: PS2.
Verdict: Fighting the 2D fight.
Rating: 4/5
Despite technological advancements and Sony's PS1 era attempt to remove them from existence, 2D games still continue to eke out an existence on home consoles. Of the few modern 2D games released, you can hedge a safe bet that they're beat-em-ups or shoot-em-ups, those bastions of 90's arcade gaming and home to pixel perfect gaming.
King of Fighters XI is the latest in a long line of the revered 2D fighting series and as top contender for Street Fighter's crown has an obsessive fan base while being well known for its trademark looks and hardcore combat.
KOF XI takes the traditional gameplay and kicks fresh life into it with new characters, mechanics and moves. The 3 on 3 battles have been changed from their staid relay nature by introducing a dynamic tag-team option - reminiscent of the Marvel Vs Capcom games, it allows you to swap between players when you want and if executed correctly, a mid-combo swap can lead to devastating results.
You can also cancel special moves into super moves now (like recent Street Fighter titles) and the Dream Cancel ability has been added, which lets your lead character string together an apocalyptic series of attacks. Any worries of imbalance can be laid to rest as a mastery of timing, practice and patience is required to achieve such seamless fighting skills – take note button bashers.
With a roster of about 47 characters, KOFXI has all of the fan favourites and includes cameos from other SNK games such as the cult classic Garou: Mark of the Wolves and of course Fatal Fury.
There are a few other features like the punishing challenge mode and training options but as always, nothing compares to a bout between friends and that's where KOFXI excels as the tag-team system allows for plenty of frantic, split second improvisation while the satisfaction of pulling off complicated combos is great for post game gloating, if you're so inclined.

Bomberman Live

For Xbox 360
Verdict: It's the bomb.
800 MS Points
Rating: 4½/5
The Bomberman name has for years been synonymous with madcap multiplayer action - with over 60 iterations of the franchise it's no surprise to see it turn up on Xbox Live Arcade and despite the recent dirge that was Bomberman Act Zero, it seems to have finally found its true home.
Bomberman is legendary in getting groups of friends to crowd round and shout at a TV and the 360 allows you to do this online with your long distance mates as well.
Combining simple but addictive strategy and action in a format that anyone can pick up, the Bomberman formula has rarely changed over the years - particularly so this time round as it goes back to it's 16 bit roots for a simplified re-introduction to the series.
Transposing HD 3D visuals onto the iconic 2D action, Bomberman Live offers a multitude of levels and game types to keep the action interesting while customisation options allow you to create your own game rules and design your own unique Bomberman so at least you look good blowing up.
The usual single player puzzle levels from previous outings have been ditched, streamlining it as a purely multiplayer game with the defining feature of course being online play. Supporting up to eight player games online you can duke it out with strangers and friends while Live Camera support means you get to see snapshots of your opponents pained expressions upon their demise.
The only disappointment is the lack of 16 player support like the classic Sega Saturn version but it's a bargain for the price and eight players still proves more than enough for frenetic and fun action.
For the truly competitive out there, world tournaments and leader boards exist to prove your skill with Acme style explosives but like all great multiplayer games, they're no match against four friends sat hollering round the telly and thankfully that's one feature that'll never be removed.

Sim City

Platform: Nintendo DS.
Verdict: The most fun you’ll have with taxes.
Rating: 4/5
Back in the day I used to play the original Sim City for hours, attempting to create a pixelated urban nirvana (and probably listening to Nevermind at the same time too) but I never managed to attain the perfect balance or design for a happy city. The natural disasters or input from a younger sister never helped either. Sim City on the DS has thankfully given me a second chance to create utopia - this time Alphaville shall flourish!
Based on later versions of the series, Sim City is the first and last game from EA’s Japanese studio. Porting a PC game to a small screened handheld can’t be an easy task but they’ve done it successfully, injecting their own style and charm along the way while using the DS’ features in a logical and intuitive way.
As mayor you’re tasked with building a city from scratch, turning empty countryside into a teeming megalopolis. It won’t happen overnight though as your city starts out from nothing but the careful juggling of your budget and balance of residential, commercial and industrial zones should hopefully lead rise to a flourishing high-rise paradise.
There are however many pitfalls along the way, where disregard for crime rates, pollution and transport can stultify your city’s growth, not to mention the UFO attacks, earthquakes and great fires (possibly caused by an under funding of the fire department to afford that seaport expansion). Thankfully, help is on hand with a friendly guide offering advice at any stage (or just looking on in despair in my case).
Touch screen controls are perfect for this kind of game and Sim City sits at ease on the DS. The only downside is the size of the screen (compared to a PC monitor) and the need for a steady hand when plotting out sections of road and land (but that may just be my awful drawing skills).
Coincidentally, taking a test to determine my guide allocated me a ramshackle robot - that’s just one step away from a belching computer, film fans.

Hour of Victory

Platform: Xbox 360.
Verdict: War is fugly.
Rating: 1/5
It’s a little expected bugbear that Hi-Def visuals can actually make a game look worse by accentuating problems that standard TVs might mask over with their relative fuzziness. In the case of Hour of Victory, no cheap TV can save it from itself – this has to be one of the ugliest games I’ve played in a long time and that unfortunately has nothing to do the nature of war.
Blatantly and understandably attempting to mimic the fine Call of Duty series, Hour of Victory is yet another WWII game but at least it attempts to add to the formula by allowing you to play through each level as a commando, ranger or covert operative. Each soldier has different weapons and different abilities - the gunner has extra resilience and can move objects out of his path, the sniper has a deadly long range weapon and uses a grappling hook to reach high ground while the covert op has stealth on his side and can pick locks.
On paper this increases the replay value of the game and allows the player to choose a preferred style of combat. In reality it boils down to annoyingly constricted and unbalanced level design with frequent and intrusive messages informing you you’re the wrong person for the job. The different abilities rarely add anything to the gameplay with awkward stealth sections shoehorned in and shakily animated lock picking sequences opening up pointless new areas to explore.
Alongside the poorly realised diversity, Hour of Victory’s other problems are plain to see – ropey frame rates, jerky animation, useless AI and glitch ridden, painfully generic and derivative gameplay all help dig its shallow grave of mediocrity into a plague pit of a mess. The graphics are just the final nail in the coffin with its bland, sterile art direction, placeholder textures and plastecene sheens all contributing towards your Hi-Def TV going on strike until you apologise with flowers.
Luckily my TV has no such delusions of grandeur but for those with cash, this is one of the few 360 games that displays in 1080p – why you’d want it to is beyond reason though.

Transformers The Game

Platform: Xbox 360 (and every other viable console).
Verdict: Lacking far more than an All Spark.
Rating: 2/5
With the shiver of a youth long lost and the memory of the excellent 2005 game to go by, there was a glimmer of hope that maybe, just maybe this would be a film-to-game title that would live up to the hype. Funny thing optimism, it makes disappointment so much harder to take – the game of the movie of the cartoon of the toy is an on-screen haemorrhage and a fine example of the industry at its lowest.
Allowing you to play through the film’s story from the perspectives of both the Autobots and Decepticons, Transformers The Game is a generic button-bashing crawl to protect or destroy the world, one stilted attack at a time. Employing the basic structure of ‘go here’ and ‘destroy that’, Transformers has you battling countless dumb drones and haphazardly travelling between locales in transformable vehicle form.
Featuring some beautifully rendered robots the game is a joy to look at in stills but the crippling frame rate, glitchy action and shameful pop-up mean it’s far from what it aims to be while vehicle handling is atrociously twitchy and sound bites repeat ad infinitum, driving home the message that this game was far from ready to be released. Such is the curse of the film adaptation – it has to be released in sync with the film, regardless of finished state.
Interspersing the levels with updating mission objectives, Transformers attempts to thinly disguise the void of depth that is all too apparent but the poorly allocated time limits and lack of decent checkpoints means you’ll often end up repeating the same repetitive section over again.
Playing more like a graphically updated Godzilla or King of the Monsters game, the excellent Transformers licence and re-imagined mech design is wasted on a shallow, poorly made title that foolishly ignores all the great work Melbourne House did in crafting the only decent Transformers game two years ago.
To this day I still regret giving away my Transformers collection but I’ll never regret getting rid of this.

SOCOM Fireteam Bravo 2

Platform: PSP.
Verdict: A workable shooter with online strength
Rating: 3½/5
Eternally cursed by PS2 ports in dire need of a second analogue stick, it’s unfair that the PSP hasn’t had a decent run of games that work to its strengths. The original, lengthily titled SOCOM for the PSP was successful due to its online capabilities (an area the PSP is surprisingly weak in) and its reasonable attempt to make up for the loss of a stick.
Bravo 2 takes the baton and runs a similar course with an enhanced single player campaign, tweaked controls and extra online features to warrant its existence – if it aint broke, don’t fix it. As a stripped down version of its bigger brother on the PS2, Bravo 2 continues the tradition of covert Navy SEALs infiltrating risky places to rescue civilians, gain intel on naughty goings-on (as they’re officially known) and generally stop the bad guys from being bad by persuading them with your gun.
Fighting in a squad of two, each mission challenges you and your gun toting AI chum with a wide variety of tasks and allows you to issue orders to him in a satisfying and accessible manner. Levels are sprawling yet linear and populated with willing cannon fodder for your auto-aim to make short, unsatisfying work of.
Online is where it naturally excels, providing a unique and solid experience on the PSP, making up for the distinct lack of other games doing the same. Programmed AI never compares to that of an obsessive American teen either so staying alive is a much greater and interesting challenge.
Naturally, the down side to all that’s good about SOCOM is the control scheme – without that 2nd stick, sacrifices have been made. The use of a lock-on button removes the satisfaction of aiming yourself (unless in sniper mode) and having to manually switch into free view mode to look around means navigation can be clumsy and movement stilted. Thankfully it doesn’t ruin the game but it certainly impacts on what would have been a far greater experience with that extra stick.
Headset support is also provided for online play but only use it if you can stand high-pitched smack talk.

The King of Fighters: Maximum Impact 2

Platform: PS2.
Verdict: Minimum Success, too.
Rating: 2/5
If there was one mistake made by many in the tumultuous 3D revolution of the late 90’s, it was the idea that 3 dimensions automatically dictated success. Countless series' turned to it merely because they could and in doing so destroyed what made them strong. Street Fighter failed at it with the EX series and here we are 10 years later with SNK trying to do the very same thing with The King of Fighters.
As Street Fighter’s closest rival, King of Fighters is traditionally a polished and popular beat-em-up with its own unique characters, niche controls and exact timing. What Maximum Impact 2 does is disregard all the core gameplay mechanics that made the series great and replace them with a substandard Tekken-a-like setup, slapdash production and poor localisation.
Despite its move to 3D, Maximum Impact 2 still plays like a 2D fighter but with a side stepping button to prove that the extra dimension isn’t just cosmetic. In addition there’s a parry button for easy counter attacks (a far cry from Street Fighter 3’s precise parry system) and an emphasis on chained combos, which rely on a robotic input of button presses to a potentially devastating, imbalanced and visually explosive degree.
Combat no longer feels precise and measured – replaced instead with a loose, unsatisfying system that has traded pixel perfect mechanics for a visual makeover that’s dated at best. With the likes of Virtua Fighter and Soul Calibur to compete against, Maximum Impact can’t best them graphically and stands no chance in the ring compared to their refined and deep combat, which begs the question – why?
Fans of the series will be put out at the extreme changes to gameplay (choosing to play its excellent 2D counterpart KoF XI, released on the same day) and new players will find little of merit to choose it over its superior peers. Maximum Impact 2 plays like it’s a decade old and only the most obsessive fans will find something to glean from this release and that probably boils down to seeing Mai Shiranui’s exaggerated physical assets in three dimensions – revolutionary!

Pokémon Pearl/Diamond

Platform: Nintendo DS.
Verdict: Repetition at its finest.
Rating: 4/5
After reducing my eyes to shrivelled raisins playing the original Pokémon for the length of a 12 hour coach journey to Prague (note to self – fly) and too many hours spent post-college in front of the cartoon theorising about them (self-replicating organic robots anyone?), Nintendo's phenomenally successful and surreal series has always had a special place in my heart.
After the disappointing diversions of Ranger and Dungeon, the series has finally gone back to its roots and Pokéfans will know exactly what to expect – a sweet and colourful adventure through Pokémon infested lands, filling your Pokédex with data and while attempting to become the best trainer in the land.
The region of Sinnoh is a new yet familiar land that feels like home despite its clever and subtle move to 3D. With over 100 new Pokémon to seek out there's plenty for the Pokéfan to do yet Diamond/Pearl doesn't just rest on this statistic to offer reason for its existence.
The latest in the series puts the DS' dual screens to good use with the lower one used for touch screen battle controls and the Pokétech – a handy gadget that runs different applications with a retro LCD screen and Gameboy style graphics.
Alongside the Pokétech, there are plenty of other nods back to its roots with 8-bit sound effects and the timeless adherence to the series' gameplay and presentation, despite its technological advancements.
As a natural extension of Pokémon's favoured and heavily strategic Vs battles, the DS' WiFi capabilities naturally mean battling and trading with your friends is a whole lot easier and also allows you to play with friends around the world online.
Unfortunately online battling is restricted to just between friends which means you can't compete on a global scale, yet – thankfully Pokémon Battle Revolution on the Wii is going to introduce world ranking matches.
Pearl/Diamond treads familiar ground, for good and bad, yet it does it with such charm and a self-referential wink that it'll keep the Pokéfans happy for hours to come, which is all you could really ask for - thank goodness for the DS' backlit screen.

Shadowrun

Platform: Xbox 360, also PC.
Verdict: A shadow of its potential.
Rating: 3½/5
To brave the fervour of fans is something every developer and filmmaker must deal with when adapting a franchise with cult status. Many ignore set-in-stone rules (hello Judge Dredd the movie), others embrace every nuance with great love (Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic). Shadowrun is a game that manages to sit between the two – taking a much loved RPG and turning it into a squad based shooter was never going to sit well with fans yet at its heart lies much of the series' stylistic trademarks.
Unfortunately launched during Halo 3's ever-so-slightly-popular multiplayer beta, Shadowrun is an FPS with many similarities, specifically designed as an online multiplayer game. Based loosely round the framework of Counter Strike and mimicking Halo's party system, Shadowrun adds different race types, ancient magic and futuristic technology to the mix.
Impacting the traditional gun based gameplay of the genre, magic and technology expand the players strategic options and combat repertoire. No longer limited to guns n' grenades, the player can teleport through objects, summon demons, glide from rooftops, see through walls and even bring the dead back to life. As the tag line states, the rules of combat have indeed changed and every ability has a role to play, creating a varied and balanced playing field ripe for quick witted improvisation and tactics.
While the core game is a solid and occasionally inspired shooter, where it falls down is its lack of content. Sold at full price, Shadowrun is offering what many games include as an added extra. Combined with having only two game types on offer and a relatively limited number of maps, Shadowrun lacks the variety and customisability an online only title should include by default. To shun a splitscreen mode is the final nail in the coffin for many and a bizarre omission from a game that shines so much in certain areas.
A logical continuation of the franchise's roots would have been something more akin to the original Deus Ex – a deep and innovative RPG shooter (with added multiplayer), not this fun but frugal title, which is why the fans are baying for blood.